Israel will not win security by crushing Lebanon

The Observer's Ned Temko reported from war-torn Beirut before taking up the editorship of the Jewish Chronicle. Here, this veteran observer of the region warns Israel against getting embroiled in a deadly occupation

The scene is the tiny village of Hadatha in south Lebanon, nestled among sun-scorched hills barely a mile from the border. Israeli mortar fire thumps in relentlessly. Warplanes scream overhead, first on reconnaissance and then to disgorge bombs. Villagers crouch terrified in homes and farmhouses. The aim of Israel's military offensive? To clear a 'security zone' and, once and for all, to keep a guerrilla army that is clearly beyond the control of Lebanon's government from raining rockets on to towns throughout northern Israel.

That was March 1978. It could have been yesterday - not least because, along with an American reporter and the Guardian's David Hirst, I was cowering behind a knee-high wall for more than eight hours as bombs and shellfire poured down. Our families were informed that we were missing and surely dead.

But the resonances between last week's escalating Israeli offensive and Lebanon's wars of the 1970s and 1980s are more than personal. Some of the names have changed: in 1978, it was not Hizbollah that was rocketing Israel, but an assortment of Palestinian guerrilla factions. Syria, currently in league with the Iranians in supplying and egging on Hizbollah, was directly occupying Lebanon with some 40,000 troops. Yet the similarities are striking. And the lessons - above all for Israel - are powerfully relevant.

Now, as then, Israel's leaders are doing what any elected government would do if confronted with well-armed irregulars indiscriminately bombarding its towns and cities. It is striking to remove the threat. Now, as then, Lebanon's government will not and probably cannot extend its writ over a guerrilla army that represents a state-within-a-state and is resented by many ordinary Lebanese as much as the Israeli assault it has provoked.

And now, as then, the crucial question is whether Israel's conventional military superiority can alone deliver the security it seeks. The overwhelming evidence from decades of violence in Lebanon is that it cannot.

The Syrians themselves rolled in across Lebanon's eastern frontier in 1976, truck after truck and tank after tank, to quash months of sectarian war in which tens of thousands of people had been killed. The troops were greeted with smiles, rose-water and offers of thick, sweet Arabic coffee. The welcome didn't last. Last year, a coalition of Lebanese political leaders - backed by hundreds of thousands on the streets of Beirut and, crucially, by unified international political pressure - finally forced Syria's army back home.

In 1978, it was the turn of the United Nations, in the shape of a 4,000-man force optimistically dubbed Unifil, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon. The 'interim' was in line with a Security Council Resolution that envisaged the troops 'confirming' an end to the Israeli incursion and the dispatch of Lebanon's own army to the south - something that has yet to happen.

The UN troops arrived in Beirut and drove south, amid the familiar rose-water and coffee stops. At their head was a no-nonsense French paratroop commander, a veteran of the Algerian war, Jean-Germain Salvan. He was a Gallic Rambo whose chiselled features and piercing eyes seemed to snarl: 'This time, it will be sorted.' Days later, Colonel Salvan lay nearly dead on a hospital bed, ambushed by a Palestinian faction and riddled with bullets.

Unifil proved powerless either to end Katyusha rocket salvos into Israel or keep the Israelis from hitting back.

In the summer of 1982, Israel's Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon, unleashed an assault whose scale, force and ambition dwarfed the incursion of four years earlier. Sharon wanted not only to end the rocket fire from Palestinian forces in south Lebanon, but to uproot Yasser Arafat's state-within-the-Lebanese-state by fighting all the way to Beirut. He did. Thousands of civilians fled, or died. But Sharon's political endgame, which would have seen the Israeli-allied Christian Lebanese leader Bashir Gemayel installed as President, foundered when Gemayel was assassinated. Three weeks later, Gemayel's militia made their way to the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where they massacred hundreds of men, women and children.

The Israelis withdrew - if not from southern Lebanon, from Beirut and the rest of the country - and it was now the turn of Americans. The marines landed to a warm welcome and high hopes. But shortly after dawn on 23 October 1983, a young man in a pale-yellow goods truck crashed through the gate of the force's headquarters near Beirut airport. The truck was packed with explosives, and this first of what has become the familiar scourge of Middle East suicide-bombings killed hundreds - and forced the Americans out.

With the Israeli army now poised to launch another major push into southern Lebanon, the temptation is to predict that this latest show of outside force is doomed, like so many before. But the Israelis, supported however inarticulately by George Bush and however precariously by Tony Blair, are right to protest that since Israel's troops withdrew six years ago, Lebanon has failed to disarm Hizbollah. Instead, with Syrian and Iranian support, it has rockets of far greater range than the Palestinians' Katyushas.

Still, there are crucial lessons to be learned from Israel's ground invasions of 1978 and 1982. In 1978, the Israeli strike was limited in both time and objective. It lasted barely two weeks and aimed only to deal with rocket fire from the south. In 1982, Sharon's grand, tragic folly led to day upon day of bombardment of Lebanon's capital. Beirut is a city full of apartment blocks and office buildings, cafes and discos and beach clubs... indeed, strikingly similar to Tel Aviv just a few dozen miles down the Mediterranean coast. No matter how carefully targeted the attacks, to hit Beirut is to risk killing dozens of civilians and terrifying many thousands of others.

The imperative for Israel, in the days ahead, is to choose the template of 1978 over 1982 - to limit military action to dealing with the immediate threat in the south and to get out as soon as the job is done. The challenge for the rest of the world is to complete the unfinished business, not only of recent UN resolutions but of the Security Council intervention that ended Israel's incursion in 1978: to extend central Lebanese control over all of Lebanon.

That will not be easy, not least with the increasingly overt intervention of Iran. But the same was said a year ago when Lebanon's politicians and people astonished even themselves by managing to end the Syrian army's 30-year encampment on their soil. The Cedar Revolution was home-grown. But it could not have succeeded without the active, shoulder-to-shoulder insistence of the international community that the Syrian troops had to go. The same resolve and unity are now indispensable if Lebanon is to reassert control over its territory - and finally stop being the proxy battleground for the power struggles of the Middle East.